David Lamkins picked up his first guitar a long time ago. As best he can recall the year was 1967: the year of the Summer of Love. Four decades later David has conjured up an amalgam of folk, rock and jazz solo guitar music for the occasional intimate Portland audience.

On the quest for tone

I agree that we (using the "royal" we here, to mean guitarists who are
gear hounds, myself included) listen for things that might not
matter to anyone else. I have been known to drive my wife (who is a
saint) totally bonkers by playing the same riff over and over while
changing guitars, amps and settings to see what effect they have.
Why? Maybe because I'm avoiding real work (like learning how to apply
music theory to guitar - something I never got around to in my
formative years), or maybe because I'm uninspired at the moment, or
maybe... just maybe because I'm learning something about electric
guitar timbre (I refuse to use the terms "sound" or "tone" in this
kind of discussion) from all the tweaking.

First of all, I firmly believe that the whole player / guitar / amp /
room system is very complex. I think that most of us have noticed
that small changes in initial conditions can produce some fairly
noticeable changes in timbre. (Tangential note: Any mathematicians in
the house? Isn't that kind of behavior a hallmark of a chaotic
system?)

So, how do you discover how all the variables interact? You change
them and see what happens! I've always done this. When I was a
teenager I tweaked and modded my guitars - experimenting with setups,
pickups and electronics. I also modded and built amps and effects.

Now, some three decades later I still experiment. I've taken
advantage of my relative affluence to burn through a lot more gear
than I ever did as a teenager. That, and I have a lot more options
available to me than I did thirty years ago, thanks to the MI
marketplace. I took advantage of all that over the past four years to
try a lot of options that I didn't have the luxury to explore in
the 1960s and 1970s. Judging from the quality of the posts on BT, I'd
guess that a lot of you are in a similar situation with respect to age,
experience and income.

I'm not going to argue that my time was better spent searching for
gear rather than playing. However, I dare say I've learned a lot from
my experiences of the past four years. I have a couple of rigs that
I'm very pleased with, and I've learned - after spending a fair amount
of time and money - what doesn't work so well from me.

Regarding guitar heroes... I respect the old-timers as much as the
next guy. I grew up listening to Page, Clapton, Hendrix, Townshend
and the rest from that generation. But their live tone back in the
day wasn't always top-notch. We're lucky to have recordings and films
from that era. But listening to, say, Hendrix at Woodstock or with
Band of Gypsys, or to Page on the new Led Zepellin double DVD, I'm
impressed much more by the raw energy of their performance than I am
by either their sound or technique.

I think it's a given that guitarists of the sixties and seventies
didn't worry as much about their gear as we do - they certainly had
fewer choices to make. I also think it's pointless to wonder about
whether low-capacitance cables and true-bypass effects would have made
any noticeable difference in their performances - they made the best
of what gear was available to them at the time, just as we do now.